Chapter Text
Some time has passed since the events of the canvas and Alicia cannot cope anymore. Not only does she still have to deal with the guilt of causing the real Verso’s death and what the fire did to her, but the events of the canvas has ruined how she sees her family.
Clea shows no empathy for all the lives lost in the canvas, not seeing them as truly alive. Renoir committed genocide in the name of saving his wife despite seeing for himself that the people of the canvas were truly alive, Aline caused her to experience a completely new life and go through loss all over again because she refused to leave, and her memories of her brother have been stained by the actions of painted Verso.
She’s in constant pain from her healed burns. The damaged nerve endings cause her different levels of pain depending on the weather, her scarred skins pulls uncomfortably and her damaged lungs can cause issues breathing. She’s still struggling to adjust to life outside the canvas and her real identity, with reality not allowing her to summon weapons and fire with a flick of her wrist or allowing her to jump high distances, and her damaged body restricting the flips and kicks she could do. And she has no one to talk to about all the grief she’s faced, since her family just wants to move on from the canvas.
Alicia makes the decision to end her life. Though she decides that she’ll make a day of it instead of just doing it in her room for her family to find (and possibly stop her). Taking all of the money she has, some painting supplies, and her Esquie doll, she heads to the sea on a train, hiding her injuries using a hat and silk scarf.
On her travels, she meets an assortment of people, having more interactions with strangers than she ever has in the past. The belief that her life will be over soon making her dismiss her usual reservations when it comes to interacting with others. During a train connection, she comes across a stall selling trinkets and buys a pretty pocket watch on a whim.
Once on the coast, she makes the most of what she believes will be her last days, feeling happier than she has in a while. She meets even more people, some that she meets more than once and gets to know more personally. Then, she sets up a paint stand at a cliff overlooking the sea and paints a canvas, putting as much of herself into it as she can over the course of a few days. Alica paints a scene of Lumiere across the sea, and names it “Returning Home”. Inside the canvas, she creates copies of the people she knew in Verso’s canvas, and crafts a story for them to follow.
As she paints, people gather around to watch her. Some mistake her for a performer and throw money into her art case. On its completion, she leaves the painting on the cliff to be found and taken by whoever, along with a poem that she composed; “An elegy to Lumiere”.
(No idea on what the Elegy to Lumiere would fully look like. But I do have a few phrases and words:
“Towards a future, unknowing/Towards an end, unknowing.”
“…when there are no more to come after.”
Mentions how Alicia carries the burden of being the only one who remembers them.
Alicia questions how she is meant to keep going without them.
Alicia questions her identity.
A reference to Maelle’s “Tomorrow Comes” line.)
With her Esquie doll hugged to her chest and the pocket watch she bought in hand, Alicia approaches a cliff that leads down to the sea. Though she knows it won’t happen, she imagines that her Esquie doll will become the real Esquie when they hit the water and take her back to Lumiere, where everyone will be waiting for her.
Alicia goes to jump but finds herself reluctant. Her days on the coast had made her happier than she has been in a while, and she had people praise her painting skills. However minor, it has given her a reason to keep going. And the money she’d unintentionally earned has given her a way to keep living on her own. If she wanted, she could keep her little adventure going, painting to earn her way, see more of France and meeting more people until she was ready to go home.
A voice calls to Alicia, one of the people she has come to know, warning her away from the cliff. They don’t realise that she intended to jump and just think that she’s being a reckless.
It’s what Alicia needs to make her mind up to not jump, and she turns to move away.
Unfortunately, at that moment, the unstable ground gives way beneath her feet and she falls into the water.
Alicia wakes up being dragged out of the water, only half conscious. She hears broken conversations questioning who she is, reactions to her injuries, and someone pointing out the quality of her clothes before passing out again.
She awakens proper in a hospital bed. She has no severe injuries but her memories are initially scrambled from hitting her head and she has come down with something from being in the water. She remembers her name as Maelle at first since that’s the name that comes to her first, which causes issues in finding her family.
The memory loss is temporary and improves as she heals. But as she has two different sets of memories of two completely different worlds, it causes her a lot of confusion.
Alicia is shocked by the puppets working at the hospital. The hospital staff write this off as being from her memory loss but it’s actually because Puppets don’t exist outside of Krat and so she has no instinctual familiarity with them.
Alicia is still in the hospital when the puppet frenzy happens. She manages to escape the hospital and finds her way into a Stalker’s safehouse. In the Stalker’s home, Alicia finds a rapier, which she takes to protect herself, and a mask that she can use to hide her burn scars.
Supplies run low and Alicia eventually has to start venturing out to gather more. When attacked by puppets, she’s surprised to learn that she does know how to fight to an extent, though is hampered by her injuries and being blind on her right side. This prevents her from venturing too far from her hideout.
P eventually comes across Alicia, who is still going by Maelle. With the warning about being careful on who he tells about the hotel and Alicia coming across as suspicious due to her muteness, P doesn’t initially tell her about the hotel. But after Alicia helps out P and he sees how ill her health is, he does guide her back to the hotel.
At the hotel, Alicia continues to try and piece together her confusing memories and dreams, creating sketches and writings based on them. She keeps to herself and doesn’t interact much with the other survivors, keeping her mask on to hide her burns.
P helps Alicia a bit with her memories. After seeing a sketch of Esquie, he finds the doll washed up on some rocks and recognises it from the sketch, bringing it back to Alicia. She’s happy to reunited with her Esquie doll and gives P a hug as thanks, though quickly pulls away when she realises what she’s doing. There is a hidden pocket inside the Esquie doll that contains a waterlogged diary, most of it is illegible after drying it, but there’s enough there to help Alicia with understanding her past.
Alicia is restless in the hotel, feeling that she should be doing something. She starts training against the puppets in the yard, which leads to her getting to know Eugenie when the woman offers to help with her rapier. She also spars with P whenever he returns to the hotel, which strengthens the bond between them and leads Alicia pulling P into other activities that a normal puppet wouldn’t care about.
Alicia eventually suggests a supply run to the hospital so that the survivors can have medical supplies. She herself needs pain killers as her burns injuries are causing her more and more pain, cream to reduce the tightness of the scar tissue, and oxygen tanks to help with her breathing if she gets sick (her lungs and throat damaged from the fire meaning that any sickness that affects her breathing is a lot more serious).
Feeling that she needs to do something, Alicia volunteers to go to the hospital with P for the supply run. During the run, Alicia has to stop at multiple points and leave P to deal with enemies as she quickly runs out of stamina, and P has to save her after a puppet comes at her from her blind side. She eventually takes off her mask to reveal her burns to him and confesses to not being a Stalker, though is not something she actively claimed and only let people assume. P doesn’t judge her for this or even react to her scars, much to her relief.
After completing the supply run, P convinces Alicia to stay at the hotel from now on, instead of attempting anymore big missions.
Alicia lets the other survivors see her burn scars and they thankfully don’t react too much to them, though they do become more protective over her after realising her age. She begins to interact more with them and grows relationships with them.
Venigni helps by giving Alicia a typewriter to communicate better (her burns make fine-motor control harder and painful), and later on a prosthetic eye to replace her missing one. After seeing her art of Esquie, he also works with her to create a blueprint for creating an Esquie puppet as a way for them to bond.
Using the typewriter, Alicia consolidates all she remembers into a book, which helps her order and regain the rest of her memories. Though, some memories are permanently gone, or don’t have the same emotional attachment as before.
…
After P opens up the way to the Gold Coin Tree, Alicia wanders in and meets Paracelsus, under his Giangio persona. After learning of her injuries, he offers some remedies in exchange for her picking some Coin Fruit for him or escorting him through the city, which greatly reduce her pain and the pulling of her scars.
Paracelsus eventually recognises Alicia as a Dessendre from her hair and burns, having heard about the fire that killed their son and severely burned the youngest daughter, as well as what she shares with him about her memories. He’s also aware of them being Painters and wants to use that.
In exchange for a remedy that will heal Alicia’s throat enough for her to speak, he asks for a small vial of her blood, which he frames as needing untainted blood for his research into curing the petrification disease, and Allicia having the cleanest blood since she’s from outside the city. Though, his real motive to hopefully find something special in the blood of a Painter to unlock more ways to immortality.
Alicia cries on the return of her voice, though it’s raspy and she can’t use it for too long.
When Paracelsus leaves Krat, he has some people look more closely into the Dessandre family, particularly the youngest daughter. He learns of her believed accidental death by falling into the ocean and unconfirmed rumours surrounding the events of the canvas that match what Alica shared of her memories. He acknowledges that Alicia has gone through many trials, and he heavily suspects that fall into the ocean was not an accident. But in the end, she survived it all and he watched her grow remarkably during his time knowing her.
Alicia holds a lot of potential that could be moulded into something great if done correctly, though if she is to be a sister or a valuable tool is yet to be seen.
Alicia’s family do not yet know if she’s alive and it’s unclear if she’ll reach out to them once Krat is cleared of its evils/the survivors escape. So, they’ll need to decide quickly on whether they want to take her while she’s still believed to be dead by the world.
…
After Simon Manus and Gepetto’s deaths, the survivors slowly work on cleaning up Krat. With the factory secured and no outside force to give orders, Venigni can make new puppets that won’t frenzy to help in the clean-up. He can’t make too many though, as there’s not going to be any new materials coming in, so what they have is all there is. Most puppets made are just for clean-up, leaving P and occasionally Alicia to take out the remaining hostile puppets and carcasses.
Communication with the outside world is reestablished and they eventually clear up enough of Krat for the military to move in and take over clean-up efforts.
At this point, the survivors have the option of getting taken out of Krat, but those in the hotel choose to stay as there’d be nowhere for them to go.
Alicia has the choice of returning to her family now that she remembers them, but ultimately chooses not to. She won’t actively hide from them, but she won’t seek them out either. Mostly because she doesn’t want things going back to how they were, but part of her also wants to use her believed death as a punishment against her family for what they did.
Despite the additional tragedy of the Krat disaster, she has found the motivation to keep living through P and the other survivors. She still has days where the depression hits her hard, but it’s not the constant suffocating weight that it used to be back home.
As she’s still underage, Venigni takes over as Alicia’s guardian. With so many dead in Krat, no authority questions it.
At first, only the military and people already there are allowed in Krat, but it’s eventually deemed safe for more people to come in, including news reporters. The hotel survivors gather to have a picture taken of them in front of the hotel, with Alicia and Eugenie being prompted to wear dresses and hats for it, as is more proper, though Alicia insists on keeping her sword.
Back in Paris
The Dessendre family notice Alicia missing the morning after her running away and do their best to track her down. They follow her trail to a seaside town where they’re told about a painter girl who tragically fell into the sea, leaving behind her finished painting and a poem.
The painting and poem has received much attention due to the tragedy surrounding it, people coming to analyse the work. Someone even theorises that the painter might have planned her death to bring attention to her work.
After retrieving the painting and seeing what it is and what it’s called, the Dessendres are certain that the girl that fell was Alicia and that she didn’t fall by accident, causing them pain.
Renoir is heavy with guilt. He had known that Alicia was suffering, but how could he help her when he was the cause of her suffering? He’d known that the people of the canvas were real people, had seen for himself that they were capable of love, hate, fear and sacrifice. Yet had still erased them to save Aline. To him, they were like the people he read about in the newspaper, they and their tragedies were real, but secondary to the life of himself and his family.
He'd tried to comfort Alicia, and in a way assuage his own guilt. In a twisted way, the Fracture and later the destruction of the canvas, were a kindness to the people of Lumiere. Aline, in her pursuit of the perfect world to escape to, had made them as human as possible, and by their nature, humans had a thirst to explore and test the boundaries of their world. And by its very nature, the world of a canvas would only be as big as its creator made it, nothing further lay beyond it. And while Verso’s creations were content with the small size of their world, the humans had not been made for the canvas, so would have eventually explored all they could of their world, learned the truth, and then become discontent and disheartened. The Nevrons, at least, had given the people a reason to not explore and rub against the restrictions of the canvas.
Alicia hadn’t taken any comfort in this retroactive justification.
Back home with Alicia’s last canvas, Renoir delves into the painting to try and understand his daughter’s mind in her final days.
He is unsurprised to emerge into Lumiere, though one more developed than the original. But in direct contrast to the Lumiere created through his and Aline’s conflict in Verso’s canvas, everyone in the city is old, not a young person in sight. Through exploring, he learns that the events of Verso’s canvas did happen in Alicia’s (or at least everyone believes they happened), up until the defeat of the Paintress and the return of Expedition 33. In Alicia’s canvas, there was no final Gommage of the remaining humans of Lumiere, and instead they were free to live the rest of their lives and branch out from Lumiere. Some of the Gommaged people even returning.
Talking with one of the old residents, Renoir is surprised to realise that he’s talking to an aged Gustave. In Alicia’s canvas, Gustave was not killed by Renoir’s painted counterpart and Painted-Verso seemingly doesn’t exist, so he is the one who returned triumphant to Lumiere to live out his life alongside a resurrected Sophie.
“Gustave” directs Renoir to the Painted-Maelle. This Maelle, also old and looking similar to Aline, is entirely aware of the painted nature of her world, though is unbothered by it. On her return from Expedition 33, she has become a popular writer with her own library, and she behaves much happier than Alicia has ever been, even before the accident. Renoir realises that Alicia has created a version of herself that gets to be happy in a way she can’t.
The people in the canvas talk in vague terms about some sort of end and renewal in a matter-of-fact way, and Maelle is deliberately tight-lipped about it, stating it is simply “the end” but also not. So, Renoir uses his painter powers to speed up time in the canvas (basically letting the time-dilation pass by while still being in the canvas), and sees the people of the canvas grow older, with still no children appearing, until everyone looks to be on death’s door. Returning time to normal, he watches the elderly citizens of Lumiere gather on the docks at they had once done for the Gommage, though the atmosphere is much lighter and calm. The people speak of what things might be like for their next “cycle”.
Renoir watches as the people once again Gommage, though there is no crying, only acceptance. He’s surprised that Alicia would have this happen in her canvas after how hard she fought to preserve Verso’s. Eventually, Maelle is the only one left, writing in a book. She explains that she is documenting the final moments of this “cycle” before things restart. She finishes her book with a “The End” and then closes it, putting it on a shelf with several other similar books. Then she also fades into petals. The petals from the Gommage wash over the city and Renoir watches as all the changes that had been done to Lumiere and beyond are undone, reverting things back to how they looked in Verso’s canvas. And the petals reform back into people, all of them under the age of thirty-three.
From the Continent, the surviving members of Expedition 33 appear on the back of Esquie. Greeted excitedly and celebrated for their “victory” over the Paintress.
Renoir understands what Alicia has created. A world of cycles. Instead of constantly growing and eventually brushing against the bounds of their canvas, the world re-starts from the moment of Expedition 33’s return and ends once everyone has reached the natural ends of their lives. Somewhere where facsimiles of Alicia’s friends and herself get to live out full and fulfilling lives for as long as the canvas exists, in place of the real versions. And because the people were actually made for this canvas, they accept it all as normal, instead of it being something tragic.
But because of that, the people of this Lumiere are not truly human, at least not in the same way that Aline’s creations had been. To experience suffering and to break past the bounds of the world are two fundamental parts of being human, and to remove those things means that Alicia’s creations are more akin to Verso’s Gestrals.
Renoir keeps returning to Alicia’s canvas and poem to try to understand what his daughter had been going through, to find any hidden meaning in it. It’s only when Clea threatens to destroy the canvas and poem to prevent him from repeating Aline’s mistake that he realises that trying to find meaning in Alicia’s death through her work isn’t going to help.
Instead, he turns to painting a new work of his own. A sort of companion piece to Alicia’s canvas, channelling his own feelings on his daughter’s death, as well as Verso’s death while he’s at it.
…
The Dessendre family are aware of the Krat Disaster, but it remains distant as everything is contained to Krat. The abundance of Puppets and Carcasses have the military focused on containment, and the Puppets are organised enough to plan against attempts to move into Krat while under Gepetto’s control. So, the family don’t pay it much mind. Even when the newspapers release a photo of the Krat survivors, the family’s copy of the newspaper gets buried and forgotten at first.
It takes a family friend mentioning the similarity between Alicia and one of the survivors a while later for the family to take notice. On the front page is a girl with drastic burn injuries stood with the other survivors, the quality of the picture makes it hard to see the details of her face, but the accompanying article calls her Maelle.
The family travel to Krat as soon as they’re able and find Alicia at the hotel.
They happily reunite, though Alicia refuses to return home with them. She has created a life for herself, one without the pressure of being a Dessendre or Painter, and where she isn’t stifled. She enjoys being an occasional Stalker when her health allows it and going wherever she wants, to write in her free time without disapproving glares, to paint only when she wants and without expectation of quality, and working with Venigni to create Puppet designs.
Renoir and Aline are reluctant to allow this, Aline especially, but eventually agree to let Alicia live her life, knowing what the alternative could be. And Renoir reasons that at least in Krat, his daughter is actually living a life, rather than wasting away in a painting.
The Dessendres stay in Krat for a time before returning to Paris without Alicia, though keep in regular contact from that point.